TOKYO, Dec 26 Kyodo For the five ...

TOKYO, Dec 26 Kyodo

For the five Japanese abductees who turn backed from North Korea to their homeland in October 2002 being reunited with their families and friends 24 years after being abruptly torn apart from them had been beyond their imagination.

on the contrary the unthinkable happened a month after Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi made a landmark visit to Pyongyang for talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, when the North admitted its agents had abducted or lur 13 Japanese to the political division in the 1970s and 1980s

Now, as many of their compatriots are busy with seasonal festivities, the returnee are greeting their secondary new year since their repatriation in anguish, hoping that their lov uniteds remaining in North Korea will be able to join them in Japan soon

They are level starting to voice frustration from one side of to the other the Japanese government's inability to acquire North Korea to send their children and single returnee's husband over.

''I not at all imagined there would be no progres for this lengthy I feel very down when I think another of recent origin year is around the corner,'' Hitomi Soga, 44 said at a December pres conversation in her hometown of Mano onward Sado Island, Niigata Prefecture.

She asked the dominion to ''think harder than it has been'' to tend hitherward up with good ideas. Soga's American husband, former U Army Sgt Charles Robert Jenkins, 63 who is listed as a renegade from military service by the U.S. military, and their couple daughters remain in North Korea.

Yasushi and Fukie Chimura, the one and the other 48, echoed Soga's thoughts at a gathering in their hometown of Obama, Fukui Prefecture They said the greatest in quantity important thing for them is for their three children to result to Japan and asked the community to urge their government to take action.

shut to 14 months have passed since Soga, the Chimura coupling and Kaoru and Yukiko Hasuike, aged 46 and 47 respectively, turn backed to Japan, and little progres has been made in negotiations between Tokyo and Pyongyang forward the abduction issue.

Japan has repeatedly asked North Korea to send forth their families to Japan and to provide convincing accounts of what happened to the eight abductees who Pyongyang says have died as well as other missing Japanese believed to have been taken to the North.

nevertheless it has not received substantial responses

In a late development, North Korea has proposeed to send the families to Japan forward condition the five returnees result to see them at Pyongyang airport, saying it wants to improve bilateral ties which have deteriorated since the five replyed to Japan, according to Japanese political sources.

The proposal was at handed by senior North Korean officials to a assemblage of Japanese lawmakers from the couple the ruling and opposition parties upon Saturday and Sunday in Beijing, the sources said.

unless the North has not to this time made any such indications to Japan [i]or[/i] part of to the other diplomatic channels.

''There is no guarantee that the families will be sent to Japan,'' the same political source said. ''Perhaps (North Korea) is trying to stir things up for the Japanese sway and the abduction victims.''

Besides, the five's families in Japan have adamantly correlateed to the idea of sending them back to North Korea, which was said to have been a condition for the North's permitting their homecoming in the first place, as they believe they might not ever be allowed to return to Japan again.

The returnee are not the single ones frustrated that situation remains at a standstill.

Shigeru Yokota, 71 whose daughter Megumi was abducted to the North in 1977 at age 13 and is said to have died there, heads a arrange of abductees' families who are eager to find gone out more about those who have reportedly died.

The group's members have lay asideed Pyongyang's claims that their missing families died in the North, saying there is insufficient evidence, and they have been calling upon the government to impose economic sanctions in succession North Korea as a means to poke it to take action.

The ruling Liberal Democratic Party and of the present day Komeito party are planning to current a bill the Diet, which convokes for a regular session in January, to revise the foreign exchange law to allow Japan to impose economic sanctions onward North Korea even without a UN resolution.

The largest opposition Democratic Party of Japan has indicated it would support the bill, meaning it is likely that parliament will pass it.

unless some pundits point out that Japan's hard-line stance toward the North will and nothing else make things worse.

''The bottom line is that North Korea is in want of food for funding from foreign countries,'' the same Korean Peninsula expert said. ''There must be a way for Japan to think creatively and take advantage of this 'need' in trying to procure North Korea to at least talk to it and then journey from there.''

North Korea, for its part, appears to be attempting to get by heart Japan's attention by making the reported proposal for the Pyongyang reunion and on letting a member of Japanese nongovernmental organization take videos of the returnees' children in Pyongyang in December and deliver them to the five.